After months of anticipation, Windows 8 is here. It launches today and goes on sale globally tomorrow. For the last year and a half, we've tracked its progress across three betas and the final release, exploring the ins and outs of Microsoft's most ambitious product launch in two decades.

Over the next few days we'll be publishing a barrage of Windows 8 coverage. Today we'll have the main review, which concentrates on Windows 8's radical new user interface and asks if Microsoft has at last managed to realize its dream of a true tablet PC. We're covering the installation and upgrade experience in a separate feature. On tap is a screenshot tour that shows off Redmond's shiny new look and feel, and we'll also look at benchmarks to make sure the OS still runs as well as it should.

In the coming days, we'll be peeking under the hood in an investigation into the work Microsoft has done to make Windows 8 more secure, more efficient, and more flexible. We'll couple that with an extended look at Storage Spaces, the software giant's solution for managing all your disk space needs. We'll also be looking at the all-new Xbox-branded multimedia experience.

Starting this weekend, we'll have reviews of the bundled Bing applications and Microsoft's range of new games, along with a look at Windows 8's new enterprise-oriented features. We'll finish up with an examination of the platform's core communication and messaging apps early next week.

It has been almost 17 months since we got our first look at Windows 8. Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and the Windows Live Division, and Julie Larson-Green, vice president of program management for the Windows Experience, demonstrated the new Windows 8 Start screen, codenamed Modern Shell, the first major change to the Windows user interface since Windows 95... 17 years ago.

The change was fostered by the realization that touch computing could be a mainstream phenomenon—would be a mainstream phenomenon—as long as it had a user interface that was comfortable and convenient when controlled by fingertips alone. In the summer of 2009, after Windows 7's development was finalized and before Apple's iPad was announced or released, Microsoft set about creating the user interface that would make Windows a genuinely touchable operating system that would be at home on tablets.

The fundamental flaw with both of these systems was that Microsoft left the Windows user interface, designed as it is for mouse and keyboard, essentially unaltered, relying on styli to replicate the kind of precise manipulations that mice enabled. The result was awkward and unwieldy.

The iPhone's success demonstrated to the world that touchscreens were in fact viable input devices, but also that direct manipulation with fingers, coupled with larger, redesigned user interfaces, were instrumental in achieving widespread acceptance. Touch interfaces could be natural, intuitive, and popular, as long as they were sympathetic to the limitations of finger input.

The user interface, reimagined

For Windows 8's user interface, fingers would come first. But Microsoft has never regarded tablets as a category in their own right; they have always been tablet PCs, with "PC" carrying important implications of its own. PCs are flexible, they're available in all shapes and sizes, from the slimmest ultraportables to full tower, multiprocessor, multimonitor behemoths. Windows 8 could not sacrifice this variety, so although fingers would come first, they would never be the exclusive input method. Windows 8 had to bridge the gap: it had to sport a finger-first user interface that would also work with mice and keyboards.

After that first glimpse of the Start screen, our first real experience with Windows 8's Modern Shell came in September 2011 at a developer conference called BUILD. In sunny Anaheim, California, we got to use the first public beta of Windows 8, the Developer Preview.

By then, the core concepts of the interface were already set in stone. Windows 8 would have two personalities. One personality would be the traditional desktop and taskbar for traditional mouse-and-keyboard applications. The other would be a new interface designed with fingers as first-class citizens, but also supporting mice and keyboards. The aesthetic of the new interface was described as Metro, as it was inspired by the signage used on mass transit systems around the world: bold use of color, a dependence on typography, and clear, stylized iconography.

Applications themselves would similarly be split between the traditional desktop software and the new Metro style apps: touch-first, but mouse and keyboard accessible.

(Microsoft has since backed away from the Metro name, but the company has not offered any superior replacement terminology, so Metro is what I'm sticking with.)

Sinofsky has described this dual interface as a "no compromise" approach, giving users the best of both worlds, "seamless" switching between Metro and the desktop, an "amazing" touch experience, but also an experience that works with mouse and keyboard.

291 Reader Comments

There's no technical reason why a program couldn't generate tiles and a desktop UI, but because they're so adamant on copying Apple's (edit: iOS, not Mac) app store strategy, it can't be done.

With a modicum of foresight, Windows Phone 7 would've been designed to allow seamless app migration to WP8, Windows "Tablet" 8, and Windows 8 Metro. Since they didn't plan ahead well enough, Windows RT (why isn't it called Windows Tablet?) has a dearth of apps at launch.

Windows 8 on ARM could've opened doors, if they had gone with an open strategy. There are a lot of potential uses for an ARM-based Windows platform that aren't tablets or phones, and none of them can be explored.

The desktop side of Win8 is nicely optimized from Windows 7, but it suffers from what Microsoft did to the rest of the system.

Windows 8 could've been great. It ain't, because nobody stood up and said "this is crap, we can't do it like this."

Microsoft used to be the purveyors of 'open' platforms... now Google is.

What I find incredibly ironic about Windows 8 is that Microsoft's failing in touch interfaces was, for so long, to not realize that they are separate devices and require a separate UI paradigm. With Windows 8, they introduced the new UI paradigm... but reversed the failing in that now they are forcing it upon non-touch users. Just as touch devices require a UI that plays to their strengths, so too do traditional PCs, but Microsoft is no longer willing to provide that.

Great article. I liked how you avoided the common internet rant ("tiles are ugly! where's my start button?!"), and revealed that it actually works pretty well with either touch or desktop input. And good job highlighting probelms I hadn't heard before, such as how the "share" and "search" charms work. These are things MS needs to fix in updates without going back to the drawing board with the basic concept of the OS (which I think is a good concept).

I've seen non-IT folks love or hate the new OS. Like any big change, the user interface will be a polarizing subject.

That being said, as a systems administrator, I'm a big fan of both Windows 8 and Server 2012. Client Hyper-V? Yes please. Oodles of cmdlets in the new PowerShell? Thank you!

There's a lot to like about this new OS, it's sad that so much of it is overshadowed by something superficial like the UI. On the other hand, it certainly could have been better, and I suspect they will continue to improve it. Thanks for the insightful article, didn't realize how segregated the Metro and Desktop sides were.

I've been running 8 for the past few months, and I think this review is generally most of my ideas. IMO, its better than 7 if you know how to use it. I don't really use metro much, only for searching, where it actually works well. Other than that, works fine for me.

Microsoft thinks they can just get users by forcing them to use something. I think this will only make more people dislike Metro if they end up stuck with Windows 8. I don't want to deal with any of that Metro mess on the desktop, especially when there's so little to be gained from it, and it seems the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages. I'll be sticking with Windows 7 until Microsoft decides to not use PC users into a tablet interface, in the same way they tried to force tablet users into a PC interface before Windows 8.

A huge annoyance to me is the Music app. It's a total piece of trash, so much so that I have to go *BACK* to iTunes.

It doesn't encompass network drives. It's ridiculous. I have music on a server which I can get at through iTunes, but not through the Music app. So what do I do? I run Spotify and iTunes to replace it.

It's abysmal that with Windows great support of networking with other Windows boxes, I can't get to my music. And this is likely true for a lot more than Music. But it's a pet peeve.

This is vexing in Windows 8; it's arguably even more annoying in Windows Server 2012. The Start screen could make an ideal at-a-glance console, with Live Tiles to indicate the health of various system components and services. Except it can't do this, because doing that would require Live Tiles that were generated by desktop applications, system services, and PowerShell scripts.

I am so sad this isn't reality. I know Microsoft wants people to make Metro apps, but Desktop apps being able to make Live Tiles would be fantastic. And notifications on the lock screen. I love that.

There's no technical reason why a program couldn't generate tiles and a desktop UI, but because they're so adamant on copying Apple's app store strategy, it can't be done.

With a modicum of foresight, Windows Phone 7 would've been designed to allow seamless app migration to WP8, Windows "Tablet" 8, and Windows 8 Metro. Since they didn't plan ahead well enough, Windows RT (why isn't it called Windows Tablet?) has a dearth of apps at launch.

Windows 8 on ARM could've opened doors, if they had gone with an open strategy. There are a lot of potential uses for an ARM-based Windows platform that aren't tablets or phones, and none of them can be explored.

The desktop side of Win8 is nicely optimized from Windows 7, but it suffers from what Microsoft did to the rest of the system.

Windows 8 could've been great. It ain't, because nobody stood up and said "this is crap, we can't do it like this."

Microsoft used to be the purveyors of 'open' platforms... now Google is.

What the heck are you talking about? The Mac App Store doesn't lock out those apps from accessing the rest of the OSX environment. All it does is centralize your billing and application updates.

The reason that Microsoft is locking out the Windows Metro style apps is because Microsoft has tried to create a one size fits all OS. Microsoft needed to retain legacy support thus they couldn't get rid of the old Windows desktop applications support but Microsoft also wanted to start anew as well. Basically, they ended up with compromises from both sides. They knew that they had to restrict and more or less sandbox these Metro style apps because the Metro half of Windows 8 is their answer to iOS and thus Metro apps are going to be on a lot of lightweight Windows RT tablets. Sandboxing and restrictions would be required in those situations due to the nature and intended use of such devices which would be running them.

Basically, this is not Microsoft trying to copy Apple's App Store methodology. If you had bothered to take more than a brief glance at Apple's App Store strategy, Apple has two App Stores. One for their mobile iOS platform and thus everything is pretty much sandboxed and another for OSX which is essentially just a iTunes-like storefront collection of applications with those applications behaving pretty much exactly like they would if they were downloaded outside of the Mac App Store (except with the Mac App Store, you have consolidated billing and application updating systems). Apple understood that the world is not ready to cut the cord completely from traditional computers thus that is still there, all Apple has done is provide a second computing platform which they hope will someday become their main computing platform. This is basically a strategy that Microsoft should have done. Microsoft should have kept their standard desktop while putting out a true mobile computing platform at the same time and then over the years, integrate features that worked in mobile into their standard desktop and eventually they would have been able to cut the chord completely from the traditional desktop and gotten rid of most of the need to support legacy applications and technologies.

...peter, i just want to say thanks for your wonderfully in-depth comprehensive coverage of all aspects of microsoft's windows 8 product deluge: it's a welcomed change from the way ars has covered windows launches in the past...

...jon siracusa's got some serious work ahead of him if he wants to stay competitive!..

I couple weeks ago I asked our corporate tech guy if we were going to 8 (we're still mainly on XP) and he just laughed for a while. He said we were getting upgrades to 7 later. I can't imagine the headaches and phone calls IT guys are about to get when Windows 8 starts to get mass deployments.

...peter, i just want to say thanks for your wonderfully in-depth comprehensive coverage of all aspects of microsoft's windows 8 product deluge: it's a welcomed change from the way ars has covered windows launches in the past...

...jon siracusa's got some serious work ahead of him if he wants to stay competitive!..

What, each chapter of his OS X reviews are now a dedicated article? And the Ars' featured banner is modeled after Launchpad.

I couple weeks ago I asked our corporate tech guy if we were going to 8 (we're still mainly on XP) and he just laughed for a while. He said we were getting upgrades to 7 later. I can't imagine the headaches and phone calls IT guys are about to get when Windows 8 starts to get mass deployments.

Maybe he was laughing because businesses don't deploy one-day-old OSes. Like you said, you're currently running XP.

I couple weeks ago I asked our corporate tech guy if we were going to 8 (we're still mainly on XP) and he just laughed for a while. He said we were getting upgrades to 7 later. I can't imagine the headaches and phone calls IT guys are about to get when Windows 8 starts to get mass deployments.

From my experience, in the enterprise world, that's not going to be a problem. Enterprise world users have mostly been buying Macs and iPads when buying new systems for themselves. The IT headaches have mostly been from the adoption of Macs and iPads by the users they need to support. Why is this such a headache for IT? Because for some strange reason, IT folks are mostly hardcore Microsoft users. It was only about 3-4 years ago where if you brought up the subject of "Don't you think it's a good idea if you IT folks started learning about Macs and iOS?" they would just laugh at that and give you a response along the lines of "Never going to happen."

I have no real problems with what they're doing with Win8. Saying that I would prefer an option to default to the desktop and an option to choose your defaults from the first time you start Win8 (things like photos, etc). It is kinda jarring to be in desktop mode and want to open a picture only to be thrown into the metro picture app. These are minor annoyances and can be easily overcome (by setting default programs for pics at least. for desktop mode just have it set as your first tile, click once the start screen is up, and you're back in Win7 mode). All in all I can see what they're trying to do and really have to say it could have been much worse than what it is. The beauty of software though is that it's always fixable so hopefully they take a long listen to what their customers want and roll updates out that address the more pressing issues.

This article pretty much sums up my own findings with Windows 8 as a systems administrator and "desktop only" user: the more I avoid Metro, the happier I am. Some of the arbitrary boundaries mentioned in the article do seem quite ludicrous to me - I hope they fix that sooner rather than later. I want to like Windows 8, I really do, but in the end it almost feels as half-baked as Vista did.

Windows 7 was a no-brainer upgrade from Vista for my PC's but Windows 8 doesn't have the same appeal. My systems are all non-touch, excluding one Wacom Intuous tablet input, so I'm likely to uppgrade only when MS stops supporting Win 7. Or am I missing some other reason to upgrade sooner?

I think Windows 8 is a great hybrid device OS. I'm just worried enterprise will snub it off completely. I think there are many businesses out there where such an OS could be highly beneficial. Word and Excel when docked at the office and Metro apps for ease of use and portability when out in the field. But will enterprise even take a chance at such scenarios. Microsoft, in their advertising/promotion, really needs to give real-world examples and demonstrations of this dual-mode OS making sense in a business environment. But from what I've seen so far, many aren't even willing to try.

I've got no particular fondness for Windows 7 or the Start menu. It's clunky and I'm open to a new approach. I like the idea of taking functional advantage of the wasted space that is the desktop with live tiles and such. But what I really dislike about Windows 8 is that the maddening war between UI interfaces - Windows 7 is constantly trying to come out from underneath the new coat of paint. There is all this fancy Metro interface on top with a limited degree of customization but when you start fiddling around with more advanced settings, you're suddenly yanked into the traditional control panel settings. It's incredibly incongruous and jarring. Metro/Windows 8 feels like a skin on top of Windows 7, not an new OS. It feels like Windows 8 was initially designed to be a further extension of the Windows 7 UI until they got new marching orders to make it touch touch touch but they didn't have time to implement the changes deep into the OS. Until a version of Windows 8 comes out that feels more unified and less patchwork, I'm sticking with Windows 7.

There's no technical reason why a program couldn't generate tiles and a desktop UI, but because they're so adamant on copying Apple's app store strategy, it can't be done.

With a modicum of foresight, Windows Phone 7 would've been designed to allow seamless app migration to WP8, Windows "Tablet" 8, and Windows 8 Metro. Since they didn't plan ahead well enough, Windows RT (why isn't it called Windows Tablet?) has a dearth of apps at launch.

Windows 8 on ARM could've opened doors, if they had gone with an open strategy. There are a lot of potential uses for an ARM-based Windows platform that aren't tablets or phones, and none of them can be explored.

The desktop side of Win8 is nicely optimized from Windows 7, but it suffers from what Microsoft did to the rest of the system.

Windows 8 could've been great. It ain't, because nobody stood up and said "this is crap, we can't do it like this."

Microsoft used to be the purveyors of 'open' platforms... now Google is.

What the heck are you talking about? The Mac App Store doesn't lock out those apps from accessing the rest of the OSX environment. All it does is centralize your billing and application updates.

The reason that Microsoft is locking out the Windows Metro style apps is because Microsoft has tried to create a one size fits all OS. Microsoft needed to retain legacy support thus they couldn't get rid of the old Windows desktop applications support but Microsoft also wanted to start anew as well. Basically, they ended up with compromises from both sides. They knew that they had to restrict and more or less sandbox these Metro style apps because the Metro half of Windows 8 is their answer to iOS and thus Metro apps are going to be on a lot of lightweight Windows RT tablets. Sandboxing and restrictions would be required in those situations due to the nature and intended use of such devices which would be running them.

Basically, this is not Microsoft trying to copy Apple's App Store methodology. If you had bothered to take more than a brief glance at Apple's App Store strategy, Apple has two App Stores. One for their mobile iOS platform and thus everything is pretty much sandboxed and another for OSX which is essentially just a iTunes-like storefront collection of applications with those applications behaving pretty much exactly like they would if they were downloaded outside of the Mac App Store (except with the Mac App Store, you have consolidated billing and application updating systems). Apple understood that the world is not ready to cut the cord completely from traditional computers thus that is still there, all Apple has done is provide a second computing platform which they hope will someday become their main computing platform. This is basically a strategy that Microsoft should have done. Microsoft should have kept their standard desktop while putting out a true mobile computing platform at the same time and then over the years, integrate features that worked in mobile into their standard desktop and eventually they would have been able to cut the chord completely from the traditional desktop and gotten rid of most of the need to support legacy applications and technologies.

Unfortunately, Apple is pushing to migrate that iOS Sandbox concept to OS X. And this is even apparent in Mountain Lion, an application can contain specific documents and only that application can access those documents.

And Mac App Store applications do have their limitations of what they can access within OS X. BBEdit Mac App store can't install the command line tools, nor perform authenticated saves unlike the non Mac App Store version.

so put the folder in the Pictures library. Do that, and the Metro Photo app does the right thing; you can open the first file and then navigate to its siblings just fine, without having to flip back to Explorer the whole time.

If users having difficulty figuring out the start screen, how on earth can Microsoft expect users to understand THAT!? Libraries are already the extreme of confusing. My personal experience with many different users is that no-one understands Libraries.

One for their mobile iOS platform and thus everything is pretty much sandboxed and another for OSX which is essentially just a iTunes-like storefront collection of applications with those applications behaving pretty much exactly like they would if they were downloaded outside of the Mac App Store (except with the Mac App Store, you have consolidated billing and application updating systems).

I am pretty sure that's not an accurate description of the full picture. Apps on the OS X store do have to abide by a strict set of rules, even if those rules are less strict than the ones on the iOS or Windows stores.

@DookieX - Point, I was thinking iOS, not Mac (which I am aware of, but didn't mention). Edited my post to clarify. I think in reality we want the same thing - a Windows 8 that isn't so jarring.

I feel like Microsoft should have just forked their OS. To keep Windows 7, maybe give it a iterative update, but also to have started from scratch with a true mobile OS. However, I do understand why Microsoft may have from a business standpoint, decided to go with the one size fits all approach. They may have realized that starting a new platform from scratch might just leave them open to have a DOA platform due to a severe lack of ecosystem support (we've seen this with Zune, we've seen this with Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, etc.), so with cramming the mobile platform in with the desktop platform, they at least of legacy stuff to fall back on. This legacy support is essentially Microsoft's bread and butter since they really do make money hands over fist just for supporting ancient technologies since in the enterprise world, technology updates moves at a glacial pace.

All in all though, this one size fits all and in turn one product that attempts to be all things to all people but ends up asking for all their users to make personal compromises depending on need, it's just not a great idea. On paper it looks great, but in practice, the need to be bogged down to legacy is truly the Achilles heel.

One for their mobile iOS platform and thus everything is pretty much sandboxed and another for OSX which is essentially just a iTunes-like storefront collection of applications with those applications behaving pretty much exactly like they would if they were downloaded outside of the Mac App Store (except with the Mac App Store, you have consolidated billing and application updating systems).

I am pretty sure that's not an accurate description of the full picture. Apps on the OS X store do have to abide by a strict set of rules, even if those rules are less strict than the ones on the iOS or Windows stores.

If you look at the way the OSX apps from the Mac App Store uses sandboxing, it's vastly different from what Windows 8 is doing and it's VASTLY different from how it works in iOS. One of the main sandbox features with the apps in the Mac App Store isn't really sandboxing at all. There's essentially two types of sandboxing that the dev can choose. One where they explicitly let Apple know what they need to access and when they need to access it. The other is simply requiring users to allow the application to access what it needs to access. Of course, this an entirely different subject to application censorship, as there is also a application review and approval process for applications which wishes to be released on the Mac App Store.

There's a lot to like about this new OS, it's sad that so much of it is overshadowed by something superficial like the UI. On the other hand, it certainly could have been better, and I suspect they will continue to improve it. Thanks for the insightful article, didn't realize how segregated the Metro and Desktop sides were.

The UI is, literally, how an user interacts with the machine. A lousy UI means a lousy experience.As great as the improvements under the hood are, if the average user doesn't have a nice experience, the adoption rate will suffer.